Broken Things
by Prosperina
Summary: Sydney, a ghost, watches Sark, her last lover, in his spiralling descent as he searches for her murderer.
1. Prologue

**BROKEN THINGS**

Warning: Mature kiddies only, folks. There'll be violence, sex -- you know, pretty much everything you can find on daytime soaps. Characters: Sydney, Sark   
Summary: _Sydney, a ghost, watches Sark, her last lover, in his spiralling descent as he searches for her murderer._  
Disclaimer: All characters belong to J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions.  
Notes: Thanks to Dita, Lindsay, Nu, and Gabs Hardy for putting up with my many neurotic questions. And as always, feedback is muchly appreciated!

_And I pray that my eyes never shut,  
even for death:  
I who need all my vision to learn,  
see at first hand, and interpret my dying._

--Pablo Neruda, "The Truth"

**Prologue**

The night that I died, Sark was in London. He left me the night before, sitting in front of the fireplace, the licking flames threatening to emerge from its brick-lined box. He brushed my hair away from my neck, but I didn't turn. He said something, but I can never remember what. The last time I saw him when I was alive, I didn't look at him, only felt his presence slip away. In retaliation, I removed myself—permanently—before he could make it back.

In London, he fell into the crowd at a busy restaurant. The lighting was bright, but nobody could remember him. He blended into the background like a pale ghost who faded back into existence whenever he wished. He waited there for a man to appear, waited for an opportunity to return to color, be real, to one person if nobody else. That was one of the many differences between us: I had always wanted to live life, while he simply drew on mine. That night we were both ghosts, voiceless and faceless, unheard. But in the morning it was only I who could not return.

Even as Sark waited, the man did not show. On the other side of the world, back in LA, I opened the door to him, to his flinty eyes that were never readable, but would sometimes soften. His black raincoat dripped water onto my carpet. I think I said something, perhaps asked what he was doing there. He might have answered with my name, or impending silence. It didn't matter; there was no truth in our exchange, only afterwards when he raised his knife and slid it—gently, steadily, mercifully—across my throat.

With blood trickling down to my bare feet, I might have called out to him, "_Daddy_," but it might have been just the whispering echoes of my childhood memories. The little girl called out to him as he pushed her higher on swings, his strong hands sending her one step closer to the endless sky. The older girl called out again; he cut the words from her lips as the stained carpet met her stained cheeks.

In my last moments I looked for the markings of raindrops and tears, but there were none: the blood had chased them away.

When Sark returned to the living, I felt the absence of our last bond. It was surely and swiftly that he left me behind.

_End Prologue_


	2. Chapter 1: Part 1

**BROKEN THINGS**

**Chapter One, Part One**

When I was younger, before my mother returned to her life as the enemy but after my father had discovered it, he would tell me bedtime stories about those who returned from the dead. Sometimes he called them ghosts and described them as pale and with bad teeth; sometimes he called them "bad men" (the good people never died in my childhood). After he tucked me into bed and turned out the light, I would imagine those ghosts in my bedroom, hovering at the foot of my bed, floating near my window. I would try to be brave, be strong, but soon after I would run to my parents' room and crawl into the space between them. My father would comfort me with soothing words, always knowing the right things to say, while my mother would berate him for causing my nightmares.

Sometimes now I wonder if he had been preparing me from even that age, laying out the foundation for distrust that wouldn't come to life until decades later. Those who returned from the dead were "bad men" and I was to fear them.

With time, my imagination added characteristics to these monsters, glowing yellow eyes like my neighbor's cat (sometimes the hissing noise as well), and magical powers that allowed them to walk through walls and delve into people's minds, uncovering secrets of the past and future. It was a shock to me then to find that the truth was completely unlike the fantasy. I was lonely—nobody could see or hear me—and I knew even less than when I was alive.

In every relationship there are nooks and crannies that only silence can fill: one emptiness spilling into another the way one love spilled into another, like hot wax filling a mould and stealing another's form. These were not the thoughts of my mind in the hours before Sark left for London. The silence was ill fitting, but I put it there anyway.

My footsteps were padded by the thick carpet. I pressed down on the bullet lodged in my shoulder, the sticky mess soaking through the jacket Sark had given me. I could feel his eyes on me, from a safe distance in the doorway, as they had been the entire drive home. I fumbled for tweezers and surgical thread in the kitchen drawer. It sat neatly next to a box of nails and a shiny gun. "Fuck," I swore when I lost my grip on the tweezers, the expletive echoed by the loud clatter of metal against metal in the sink. My fingers were slippery with blood.

"Here," Sark said, appearing in front of me at once, effortlessly lifting me onto the kitchen bench and taking the sewing tools from my trembling fingers. The plastic blue thread waved like stiff ribbons. He pulled the jacket from my body, exposing the swollen pink flesh, some parts mottled and open and sticky. I could see Sark in my peripheral vision—his blonde hair dulled with the dust from the warehouse, his dark clothes hanging limply off his body—but I carefully kept my gaze over his shoulder, even when he stood close enough that his thighs brushed my bare knees, and the blood on the side of his head smudged gently on the tip of my chin. Even as he deftly extracted the bullet that made a home against my bone, and swabbed a sting of alcohol onto my skin, my eyes didn't flinch, even if my body did.

"Drink." He held a bottle of scotch to my lips. I swallowed it greedily like a parched man in a desert until the throbbing pain slowly ebbed away.

"There shouldn't be a scar when this heals," he said quietly, pulling the needle in and out of my skin, threading the gaping wound on my shoulder shut. My head lolled to the side; I saw the bloodied bullet lying unceremoniously where it had rolled against a coffee cup from days earlier, the dark brown liquid dried into crust at the base.

I don't know why I looked up then, if it was the token of better times, the fact that it was the longest sentence he had spoken, or if the alcohol simply demanded I turn the other way in return for the inviting numbness.

He was bandaging the wound. His fingers were gentle, but I thought if the fabric was removed his prints would surely rise white against the rest of my skin. He looked up, his face so close that I could count the individual lashes. His eyes were quiet, like the rest of him, but they were full as if they wanted to say something, as if there was something written there I needed to read. It was just in a language I didn't yet—and now will never—understand.

_To be continued..._


End file.
